While some people craft as a hobby or to make money on the side, for others it’s a full-time business. Again, the Internet has made this possible. Etsy.com launched in June 2005 as an artist-friendly online craft retail space. Today, the site boasts between 60,000 and 70,000 active sellers. Matt Stinchcomb, Etsy’s vice-president of communications, says that the company is built around a core of social responsibility and counter-consumerism, decrying “the Wal-Mart effect.”
“We want to know where our money is going,” he says. “We want to know who’s producing the goods in our life. We want to have a connection to the producers.”
The crafters are making connections, too. Spamberly sells via Etsy and is a member of Boston Handmade, organized by Etsy’s Burko. They have already held several group shows and organized skill-sharing workshops.
Art and music
Crafting has been a communal activity since the days of colonial quilting bees, and as the modern crafting scene has exploded, it has drawn inspiration from the communities that birthed it — music being a prime example.
Mass Market definitely retains some of the music vibe of the Punk Rock Flea Market that preceded it, with features such as a music table devoted to the strong connection between the music and artists scenes in Boston.
Arkin met the co-creators of the Bazaar Bizarre through bands they were in, with the first Bazaar Bizarre booked like a rock show.
Brian Rusnica, a 25-year old Somerville resident known as Velocicrafter — his dinosaur motif is embodied by a shirt imploring everyone to “Remember the Alamosaurus” — and a member of a band called the New Dumb says that the crafting and indie-music scenes share “a perfect overlap.”
“The same people who are making art are making music a lot of times,” he adds.
According to film-documentarian Levine, the crafting scene is not homogenous. People who make stuff, she says, come in all flavors. However, when perusing the crowd at Magpie or a craft fair, they fall largely into a certain demographic — i.e. the nattily attired hipster with cash to spare. Some people also grumble that crafting’s inclusiveness is also a weakness, yielding copycat crafts and amateurish wares.
“I feel bad saying this, but a lot of times I look at the arts and crafts and I think to myself, ‘Oh, I could make that,’ ” says Mass Market attendee Todd Purple, 28, of Cambridge. Still, snark is hard to come by amongst the crafty types.
“It is a bizarrely supportive community in such a fantastic way,” says Levine. “That couldn’t happen if there were a bunch of haters.”
Making a Statement
Arts and crafts, of course, weren’t invented in the past five years. But this new breed has made crafts hip.
“It’s pretty great that the cool thing to be now is someone who’s knitting their own hand warmers,” says Burko, who is also marketing coordinator for the annual juried CraftBoston show, which stages its seventh show in March. “When has it ever been cool for a 25-year-old guy to be knitting? What’s better than that?”
CraftBoston is run by the Society for Arts and Crafts, which has been around for a whopping 110 years and is the oldest nonprofit craft organization in the country. Can high-end and low-rent meet in the middle? Burko says that there is more crossover now than ever between the two scenes, hinting at a more formalized collaboration in the works between them.
